The Latest Breaking News from Daniel Dennett

Is AI really ‘intelligent’? This philosopher says yes

Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s words, such systems display “competence without comprehension”.

The Conversation · Feb 20

Did humans evolve to prefer religion? Research shows many atheists intuitively favour faith

Many atheists consider themselves to be highly rational people who rate evidence and analytical thinking above religion, superstition and intuition. They might even argue that atheism is the most rational worldview.

The Conversation · May 21, 2025

We don’t tolerate prejudice at work. Why, pray, do we allow it in church?

When ancient moral codes clash with the values of a democracy, there should be only one winner

The Guardian - UK · Dec 8, 2024

Evolution is making us treat AI like a human, and we need to kick the habit

The artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently resigned from Google, warning of the dangers of the technology “becoming more intelligent than us”. His fear is that AI will one day succeed in “manipulating people to do what it wants”.

The Conversation · May 16, 2023

The Guardian view on ChatGPT search: exploiting wishful thinking

Editorial: Hyping AI’s utility is part of a commercial push to get users to cede authority to machines

The Guardian - UK · Feb 10, 2023

Colin Thubron: ‘Simone de Beauvoir altered my ideas about women’

The travel writer and novelist on reading The Second Sex as an 18-year-old, discovering Proust, and the brilliance of Byron

The Guardian - UK · Jan 20, 2023

The big idea: could you have made different choices in life?

We can’t change what’s happened – but we can learn to make better decisions in the future

The Guardian - UK · Jan 2, 2023

Doomsday bunkers, Mars and 'The Mindset': the tech bros trying to outsmart the end of the world

Douglas Rushkoff’s newest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, grew out of a brilliant 2018 Medium article of the same name, which went viral and had people (aka his US editor) clamouring for a full-length treatment.

The Conversation · Oct 3, 2022